1998-05-02 04:00:00 PDT BERKELEY -- Eldridge Cleaver, the former Black Panther and best-selling author whose fiery rhetoric and lucid prison writings were an indelible part of the revolution of black America, died yesterday at the age of 62.

His former wife, Kathleen Cleaver, said from New York that she learned that "some time in the last 24 hours he had a heart attack."

"He also had diabetes, and he was being treated for prostate cancer," she said. "I'm in a state of shock."

Reflecting on Cleaver's heyday, she said, "He was a very brilliant, very quiet and very stately individual who had been consigned to state prison to be warehoused. I saw him come out of that and come alive, and flourish and develop. He was extraordinary because he was so energetic and so gentle and so visionary."

Former Panther chief of staff David Hilliard said yesterday that he first met Cleaver in 1966 and thought he was "the personification of Malcolm X."

Cleaver lived in Berkeley for many years, but moved to Southern California a few years ago and lived most recently in Pomona. For the past few months, he had been working as a consultant to the Coalition on Diversity at the University of La Verne, 35 miles east of downtown Los Angeles.

Last June, he joined several Panther veterans in a tumultuous welcome in Santa Ana for ex-Panther Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt, who was released after 25 years in prison.

And last month, Cleaver appeared at an Earth Day conference in Portland, Ore., where he said, "I've gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights."

Cleaver's life was a whirlwind of variety and contradiction -- convict, Black Power revolutionary, best-selling author and media darling, fugitive from justice and quixotic political thinker whose ideas ranged across the political spectrum. He was a failed perennial candidate for public office and, finally, an introspective man who kept largely to himself.

He was born Leroy Eldridge Cleaver in 1935 in Wabbeseka, Ark., and his family later moved to Phoenix and then Los Angeles. By the time he was 18, Cleaver had already served stints in reform school and in 1954 he began a series of prison terms that would keep him behind bars for most of the next 12 years for crimes ranging from drug dealing to attempted murder and assault.

Cleaver was best known as the convict who wrote "Soul on Ice," his outraged cry against an America he saw as a vicious cauldron of racism. He wrote the book in 1965, while he was in Folsom Prison, and it was published three years later to wide critical praise and sold millions of copies.

When Cleaver emerged from prison in the mid-1960s, he found a Bay Area

seething with a strong black revolutionary spirit centered in Oakland. It was a region already primed for revolution by the Free Speech Movement and the anti-war demonstrations at the University of California at Berkeley.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PANTHERS

In the fall of 1966, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party. The original idea was that the Panthers, bristling with weapons and outfitted in berets and black jackets, would protect their Oakland neighborhoods from what they said was the predatory Oakland Police Department. But the Panthers became equally well known for organizing day-care centers and free breakfast programs.

At the time, Cleaver was writing for the left-wing Ramparts Magazine, and by the spring of 1967 he was working almost full- time for the Panthers.

Impressed by his writing and flair for oratory, Newton and Seale asked Cleaver to become the party's spokesman, and he was dubbed the minister of information.

He reveled in the job, joining the party's central committee and editing the Panthers' newspaper. Cleaver was the one who got across the message that the Panthers were going to carry weapons and weren't afraid to use them. This struck fear into the heart of white America, a fact that simply made the Panthers more dangerously attractive.

With his flair for coalition politics, Seale said in an earlier interview, Cleaver "was getting all the groups together -- the Yippies, the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). His personal style was profound, and with his writing ability he was able to give a depth of understanding to what our struggle was all about. That was his great contribution."

PRISON CRY PUBLISHED

By 1968, when "Soul on Ice" came out, Cleaver took on the added cachet of best-selling author, befriended by middle- and upper- class white liberals and toasted from coast to coast for his chilling and powerful writing on what it was like to be a black American in a California prison.

"When Eldridge was in prison, he produced the first so-called black prisoner book, the book that set the trend for revolutionary black prisoners," said former Chronicle reporter Tim Findley, who covered the Panthers during the 1960s and '70s. "And then he became the first black revolutionary figure, a cause celebre, probably with a lot of real justification."

In April 1968, Cleaver was involved in a violent shootout with police in West Oakland during which party member Bobby Hutton was killed. Cleaver was arrested and charged with attempted murder. He jumped $50,000 bail and fled the United States.

For seven years, he and Kathleen Cleaver lived all over the world, seeking refuge in Communist- or left-dominated countries where he felt secure enough to know he would not be deported to the United States. The Cleavers started out under the benevolent wing of Fidel Castro in Havana and later moved to Algeria, North Korea and, finally, France. In 1970, Huey Newton, unhappy with what he perceived as Cleaver's shifting ideologies, drummed him out of the party.

Abroad, Cleaver gave interviews and lived the life of a celebrity exile. After settling in Paris, he took a run at the world of fashion design with his unique codpiece, an item of men's clothing worn over pants -- which looked something like an outside jockstrap.

RETURN FROM EXILE

In 1975, unhappy and dispirited from his years in exile, Cleaver surrendered to FBI agents in Paris and returned to California, where he garnered more attention by renouncing his leftist ways for the newfound light of the Republican Party. After a plea bargain with Alameda County authorities, Cleaver served five years on probation.

Cleaver confounded his friends with his abrupt change in politics. He became a born-again Christian, flirted briefly with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and crusaded against his former Communist allies and for conservatives he would have shunned in an earlier life.

"I feel good about Ronald Reagan!" Cleaver told a crowd of Harvard students in the fall of 1982, as a roar of disbelief rippled through the audience.

But Kathleen Cleaver said her ex-husband's widely publicized political

swing from left to right is "a superficial analysis."

"In truth, he was a very patriotic anti-communist," she said. "I think he had examined the philosophical orientation of the American left and found it wanting. But I also think he had been psychologically degraded by the experience of his exile."

As perhaps an oblique explanation for why Cleaver changed his politics so markedly and abruptly, Kathleen Cleaver said, "he came back (from exile) a very unhealthy person, unhealthy mentally, and I don't think he's ever quite recovered. He became a profoundly disappointed and ultimately disoriented person."

In 1981, the Cleavers separated and in 1987 they were divorced.

Cleaver made desultory runs at political office in the Bay Area -- in 1984 he mounted an unsuccessful campaign for Congress against Ron Dellums -- but nothing ever came out right.

By the fall of 1992, Cleaver's politics, though, had swung back toward the center.

"He had changed a lot," Seale said. "He wasn't tooting his horn any more about born-again Christians. And he was much more critical of Reagan and Bush." Cleaver joined Seale on the lecture circuit for a while, talking about the effect of the Panthers' revolution on American politics.

In his last years, Cleaver had a few scrapes with the police. In 1988, he was placed on probation after being convicted of burglarizing a house in Oakland that was under renovation. He was jailed briefly that same year for violating his probation after testing positive for cocaine use.

In 1990, Cleaver entered a drug rehabilitation center to recover from what he said was an addiction to crack cocaine. Two years later, he was arrested by Oakland police while carrying rock cocaine, but the charges were later dropped because police had conducted an illegal search of his truck.

In March 1994, Cleaver was arrested in Berkeley for possession of crack cocaine. He became ill shortly after his arrest and underwent surgery for a severe head injury. Soon after he recovered, he moved to Southern California.

In addition to his former wife, Cleaver is survived by a daughter, Joju, and a son, Maceo, both of New York City.